“Big History” is a field of historical study that examines history on a large scale across long time frames through a multi-disciplinary approach with a particular focus on alteration and adaptions in the human experience. Big History arose as a distinct field in the late 1980s and is related to but distinct from the field of historical study referred to as “World History”, as Big History examines history from the beginning of time to the present day and into the future. Specifically, Big History attempts to unify the past from the beginning of time through the major historical regimes of Cosmic, Earth, life, and human history up to the present day. Big History offers a broad understanding of how the past has unfolded as well as the opportunity to think about what unifying characteristics there may be over history.
As the field of Big History studies all 13.7 billion years from the Big Bang to the present, a tool that facilitates the comprehension of time relationships between events, trends, and themes is desirable. Further, as a number of electronic resources and specialized online collections containing articles, images, video, sound, and other multimedia continue to grow, a tool is desirable to organize, catalog, and unify certain data relative to time.
There are several challenges corresponding to implementation of such tools. Specifically, representation of the full scope of time from the Big Bang until the present in years requires a large number, such as 13,700,000,000 in decimal, which can be stored in 1011. Accordingly, in years, representing the history of the universe is relatively easy, as even when converted to binary digits, only 34 bits are needed to represent each of the 13.7 billion years. If additional granularity with respect to time is desired, however, representing each instant in time becomes more challenging. Pursuant to an example, representing each instant in time over 13.7 billion years in the smallest units (Planck units) requires a value that is very difficult for computer systems to manage: approximately 4.3×1062, which, when converted to a binary number, is a 204 bit value.
Conventionally, registers in processors and/or integers in compilers are limited to at most 64 bits. Aligning the 204 bits required to represent each Planck unit in time throughout the history of the universe to optimize prefetch queues of a processor results in utilization of 256 bits. As noted above, registers in conventional processors as well as integers in conventional compilers do not support values of such size; therefore arithmetic functions built into a processor for processing data cannot be employed over values stored across 256 bits.